At 10:08 PM 8/23/94 -0400, Jason W Solinsky wrote:

Well we agree that the selling point is economic efficiency. But "anonymity reduces overhead" ?

I keep getting tangled up in that. I'll try again. Anonymity is not the issue. Strong Cryptography is the issue. Anonymity comes from strong crypto. Like I said before, anonymity is the byproduct of using strong crypto to build a digital cash system. It's like what I said about flight in this same thread. It turns out the best way to go really fast is to fly (at least until someone builds an evacuated tunnel with a magnetic levitation train in it, anyway). In inventing aviation, we discovered how to go really fast. It turns out that going really fast is a cheaper way to do things if time is valuable. Being able to fly, while an end in itself, is also a byproduct of wanting to get somewhere fast, at least in economic terms. It turns out that in creating an anonymous digital cash system, you can do very cheap, irrefutable transactions offline in an internetworked environment. That's cheaper for a whole lot of reasons, a relatively minor one being the ability to pool the cash without a lot of transaction recordkeeping. You don't have to know who gave you each piece of money in order to find who stiffed you, if it happens. The reduced overhead increases economic efficiency. There are other reasons for not doing on-line transactions. Including credit checks, interest calculations on outstanding balances, vendor reserve requirements, transaction threading, on-line wait states and bandwidth, etc. It's considerable. In addition, I'll forward to you off-line the Eric Hughes postings that got me started on this. They were put here on 8/19 at 12:20, 1:02, and 4:24 and 4:43. Cheez, looks like I'm citing scripture here. I feel like one of those fundamnmentalists you see in football endzones on TV. You know, the guys with the sign that says "John 6:66". ;-).

There are alot of reasons why I think anonymity is important, but I fail to see any significant economic advantage that anonymity confers to a person who otherwise couldn't care less about it.

I think like stellar formation, evolution and economic progress, the privacy of digital cash may be a happy accident resulting from the activities of a random process (internet commerce) looking for a way to make itself more efficient. It happens. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923